Recently, during a bedtime conversation about faith, my 11-year-old son mentioned a theory he had found online that the Christian story was something “made up” by ancient Romans to govern their state.
When I heard this, I nearly laughed out loud. “Who on earth,” I asked, “would ever come up with a religion like this?”
Scandal of the Cross
Who would create such a shocking story, in which God not only became one of us, but offered himself up to an agonizing death on the Cross? Such a narrative bursts the seams of common sense. Who could hope to gain any followers by making up the story of the son of God crucified?
In our times, we have grown so familiar to the paradox of the Cross that it seems almost normal, yet it is well worth seeing with fresh eyes. The scandal of the Cross is too strange, too bewildering, to be a man-made story.
The Grain of Wheat Must Die
Today’s Gospel reading confronts us with the disturbing reality of Jesus’ death on the Cross. If we listen to it with fresh ears, we perceive an equation that doesn’t quite add up, a kind of proportion that jangles against our reason. “When a grain of wheat falls to the ground,” Jesus tell us, “unless it dies, it remains only itself; but if it dies, it bears great fruit.” In other words, the grain of wheat cannot die a natural death but must offer itself up as sacrifice. He goes on to articulate the fact even more starkly: “He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life shall keep it.”
We ought to scratch our heads for a moment to ponder this. How does loving life cause one to lose it? Or hating life engender life? How can we reconcile such seeming contradiction?
Eternal Life
The answer lies in the distinction between natural human life, or psyche in Greek, and divine life, termed zoe. We all know and understand what the first feels like in our biological finitude, yet the concept of divine or everlasting life is exponentially different. One could never equate one with the other. A grain of wheat could pass through a thousand biological lifetimes as a single grain without coming close to the superabundant value of zoe, or eternal life. Jesus unveils to us the promise of this new divine life, the “living bread” which sates our deepest hunger, yet which can only be known through the offering up of the life we know.
On our own, we could never grasp this mystery. We who live in time like the grain of wheat could never appreciate the new life that abides in the “living bread.” There are no terms to quantify it. The extraordinary thing is that Jesus himself has carved out this impossible bridge between the life we know and the life of God. Much as a single word unleashes an intangible truth, so too does the eternal life of God gush forth from the pierced heart of Jesus on the Cross. Most of all, we find a savor of eternal life in the Eucharist, that little gift of finest wheat which is no longer wheat, but God’s own life poured out for us.
